There have been a lot of articles written about breast feeding, whether public
breast feeding is appropriate, where and when it is appropriate, and the issue
is not related specifically to child care, nor is it one that is relevant only
to political parties. There's a good deal of passion on the subject because
many women believe that it is a feminist issue and that hiding it is an insult
to women. But I gather that opinions within the feminist community are divided
on the subject. From my point of view, I would think that any institution such
as churches, political parties, places of employment, etc., ought to provide
child care facilities. Perhaps, some day, when we reach the social development
of the French, we'll have nationally funded child care for everyone and
individual institutions won't need to take on the responsibility.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey ;
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2017 3:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party
A few years ago - wait, time keeps creeping up on me, it must be a matter of
decades now - there was an incident in which a brand new mother was breast
feeding her baby in a branch meeting of the Socialist Workers Party. Another
female comrade took offense at that. Everyone else seemed to be okay with it
and I know that I would have been okay with it if I had been there, but the
particular comrade thought it was scandalous. The matter escalated to the point
that the national committee had to deal with it and the story ended up being
written about and published in an Education For Socialists bulletin that was
distributed to the party as a whole. The party did not take a position on
whether public breast feeding and breast feeding inside a party function was
appropriate or not. I would expect that when the issue comes up external to the
party, though, as it often does that the party would tend to defend public
breast feeding. Nevertheless, the incident was disruptive within a party branch
and there are a lot of other potential for the presence of children to be
disruptive. The final decision that was made was that children would be banned
from internal meetings and functions of the party. As for public functions, it
would be kind of hard to tell people who might attend that they must leave the
children at home or else. In fact, after that time I saw women attend Militant
Labor Forums myself with small babies and in relation to this issue a comrade
told me about a Jamaican born woman who attended a forum who breast fed her
baby while there and who was not especially anxious to cover up once the baby
had finished. In the article there was some discussion about how the DSA had
begun to provide separate child care services at its functions. I don't
remember if they were providing these services both internally and for public
events. The SWP ultimately decided that it should not take on child care
services. So the decision was that parents were responsible for arranging for
child care on there own when they were attending internal functions and, I
suppose, if a member of the public brought a child to a function and the child
caused a disruption that the parent would be approached individually and asked
to deal with it somehow. I don't know of that latter scenario ever happening
though. In the article, though, one very strong reason was given to not provide
child care for public events. That is that if something unfortunate happened it
might leave the party open to lawsuits and I think it was mentioned that the
DSA was taking that risk. All of that was a long time ago though. Internal
party policies may have changed and it was not all that common that comrades
had small children anyway. I am pretty certain, though, that the party still
does not and never has provided child care services for public events. When the
class struggle strengthens to the point of being able to have large mass
meetings that may have to eventually change too.
On 8/28/2017 10:34 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Miriam and Brave Souls Everywhere,
Right. I knew that it's not something the American Communist Party
does today, and I suspect that such programs were later than when my
folks were active in the late 30's and early 40's. At least such
expansive thinking never infected the single mindedness of the stern
faced men and sharp no nonsense eyes of the women who gathered each
week in the old store front on Queen Anne Avenue. They had a nation
to take over. I do remember my dad and some of his buddies sitting
around deciding what jobs they would take, when the "Revolution" came.
My mother was a bit more practical. "Who do they think is going to
start this revolution while they sit on their backsides blowing hot
air?" She could not tell the difference between Dad and his Buddies,
and the guys already in power. What she saw were men sitting about
ordering their flunkies out to do the work. In Dad's case, it was the
women and children who did the leg work. I can't begin to count the
number of envelopes I stuffed, sitting at the back table in that hall,
or the hundreds of flyers I tucked in doors around the North end of
Seattle. But of course while these young men were dreaming of the day
they took charge, those already in the top dog slot were not idle.
Harry Truman and Joe McCarthy with his legal counsel Richard Nixon,
along with the FBI and their many stoolies, came crashing in the front
door and hauled many of those dreamers in front of the UnAmerican
Activities Committee and painted them as Commie Infiltrators Trained
in Moscow by the KGB. The American Communist Party never had a large
following, and those young men sitting around dreaming young men's
dreams, were not ever going to mount an army of protesters. But the
Ruling Class took no chances. J. Edgar Hoover turned most of his
forces loose on hunting down those Commies and Fellow Travelers and
the Pinkos.
Later it was obvious, like Monday morning quarterbacks, it was obvious
that this was all part of a push against the "socialism" brought down
on honest Capitalists by that turncoat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It
wasn't until Ronald Reagan ascended to the Oval Office that some of
the Working Class began to awaken to the fact that they were under
attack. Until that time Unions were doing okay, wages were drifting
upward, almost keeping up with rising cost of living, credit was
becoming easier, so many families now were moving into the suburbs and
taking on 30 year bank loans. Since Ronald Reagan's 8 years, the
unraveling of our social services teeters on the brink of
annihilation. And the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover expands into a
monster, no longer content to ferret out the Pinkos, but now hunting
down the "Illegals", the Muslim Terrorists, and all who fail to kiss
the hem of our new leader's royal garment.
The Ruling Class full well knows that it is Fear that is their
greatest weapon. They use it to turn one group against another, and
to keep each individual worker fearful that his job will be the next
one sent off to...wherever. We, the working class, are held in the
grip of many Fears. Some are real, but many, many of them have been
manufactured to keep us trembling in our heavily mortgaged homes.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't think the article says that the Communist Party does all
those activities now. I think it says they once did it. Apparently,
it depended on where you lived and which faction of the party you
were involved with. I'd love to see an objective comparison of the current
Green Party and the SDA.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl ;
Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2017 12:46 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Socialist Horizon: Building a New
Party
I can live with the DSA. But can Corporate Capitalism? I am
prepared to change my vote from the Green Party to the DSA. And for
the moment, I might consider joining as a member. If the old
American Communist Party in Seattle had organized family and Party
activities, like this article says they do now, and had they put my
mother in charge of organizing concerts, lectures, child and elder
care support groups, I most likely would be a Marxist today. But
these stern, no nonsense Party leaders of the 1940's, ordered mother
to put Party before Family. All they saw was her backside as she herded her
three children out of the Hall.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party Saturday, August 26,
2017 By Benjamin Balthaser, Truthout | Op-Ed
mix of centralization and decentralization, its democratic ethos
within a larger structure, its flexibility and yet its consistency
speak to both the needs as well as the disaggregated shape and
culture of today's millennial working class.
The Democratic Socialists of America is a mix of centralization and
decentralization, its democratic ethos within a larger structure,
its flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the needs as
well as the disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial working
class.
(Photo:
Northside Chicago DSA)
As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention wound to
its close at the beginning of August, I was struck with the
historical strangeness of what I witnessed. Decades after
proclamations of the "end of history" and critiques of institutional
hierarchies and vertical structures of power, here were nearly 1,000
mostly young activists gathered in a giant lecture hall doing the
work of building a radical political party: taking votes, making
motions, electing a national leadership, making speeches for and
against, observing the strange Anglo-Saxon strictures of Robert's Rules of
Order.
The convention in Chicago has rightly garnered an enormous amount of
attention, both for the unprecedented size of the organization, as
well as for its increasingly red hue. The surge in membership makes
DSA the largest socialist organization in the US since World War II,
and its growth in strength and popularity is equally marked by its
radical turn to the left:
delegates voted to endorse the boycott, sanction and divest (BDS)
movement against Israeli violations of human rights; they voted to
embrace the creation of an Afro-Socialism Caucus that includes a
platform for abolishing prisons and police; and they reaffirmed
their distance from the Democratic Party and their role in creating
an independent socialist movement. They did all this while
strengthening the centralization and structure of the DSA by
introducing monthly dues payments for members.
As Chilean activist and writer Marta Harnecker notes, the rise of
globalization, neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War has also
led to what she refers to as the "social disorientation" of both the
working class and the left. The organization of workers into giant
Fordist factories in urban centers, the growth of social and
cultural institutions, such as massive schools and state colleges,
also did the work of organizing the people into shared sites of
social production and reproduction.
While on the one hand this modernist reorganization of life produced
greater social alienation, it also produced the physical
infrastructure for mass-based, centralized social movements. One can
think of the rise of early-mid 20th century radical parties such as
the Socialist and later Communist Party USA, which exercised wide
influence through six-figure membership bases, affiliated labor and
civil rights groups, and high-profile political campaigns as a kind
of structural analogy to the mass production/mass consumption
modernist society Fordism produced. Perhaps the largest mass-based
working-class organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO), was a direct outgrowth of the giant factories that comprised
the major sites of its organization.
An increasingly shared mass culture also helped produce new
political movements at mid-century. Small ethnic enclaves and
segregated neighborhoods could join in a dominant, increasingly
plebeian mass culture industry that featured, for the first time,
ethnic accents and working-class, urban heroes, such as James
Cagney, Duke Ellington and Barbara Stanwyck. During CIO drives, one
organizer recounted white and Black members listening to a Joe Louis
fight on the radio before going to recruit members for its
integrated locals, and Richard Wright famously wrote of the
Louis-Baer match as leading to a jubilant, spontaneous uprising
among working class African Americans on Chicago's South Side.
Within the mid-century cultural and material matrix of Fordism, the
Communist Party, unlike the Democrats or Republicans, built an
entire way of life, vertically and horizontally integrated, with
softball leagues, newspapers, dances and activity groups like the
Friends of the Earth
(camping) and the John Reed Clubs (writing) that provided not only
for the political needs of its members, but also for their social
and even romantic needs. "You could live an entire life within that world,"
one former Communist related in Vivian Gornick's oral history of the
movement. The Communist Party, like the centralized and Taylorized
mass culture of the period, was constituted by a sense of totality
and organization that marked both work and leisure. As capitalism's
"other," Communism organized much like Fordist corporations it opposed.
Flash forward a half decade, and the landscape of both capitalism
and left radically changed. Globalization and neoliberalism have not
only widened the gap between the rich and the poor within and
between nations, they have dramatically reorganized the economy away
from large-scale urban manufacturing to decentralized and
increasingly mobile just-in-time production. While this shattered
what was left of the large AFL-CIO unions, it also disrupted the
material basis for social, even socialist organizing.
White flight, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the spread of automobile
culture and online micro-communities have not only changed the way
social life is organized, they have also disrupted the forms of
organization on which the "old left" was built. If the culture of
modernism was based on the chance encounter on the city street and
collective anonymity of the factory and rail car, suburban sprawl
and the post-modern cubicle entered a new form of fragmented
alienation, one that is isolated as it is as often subcultural.
Theorists of left-wing social organization, such as Michael Hardt
and Toni Negri, as well as journalists, such as Naomi Klein,
celebrated these forms of disaggregation heterogeneity. Hardt and
Negri described the "multitude"
as the shape of the new working class. Decentralized and
unorganized, this new class of knowledge and service workers would
meet together in loose networks and horizontal associations, giving
up neither their autonomy as subjects nor their heterotopian forms
of difference. Klein described in The New Left Review the revival of
"the commons," both a public and social space held by all, as well
as a vision of radical democracy without ideological or political
center. Narrating the first uprising against neoliberalism after the
end of the Cold War, Klein remarked that the affinity groups and
spokescouncils of the "Battle of Seattle" resembled nothing more
than the internet, as well as the new forms of capitalist
organization in Silicon Valley. Flexible and just-in-time production
had met its match with flexible and just-in-time organizing.
We are a class society, riven by fault lines of race, colonial
status and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view, and
neither is its opposition.
Yet Klein made another comment after the exuberant fin-de-siecle
explosion against the World Trade Organization and an increasingly
bleak millennium.
Speaking in 2001 in front of a roomful of activists at UCLA, she
asked if the uprising in Seattle was a "movement" or a "collective
hallucination."
This question is perhaps more telling than its answer. In the years
following Seattle, the left witnessed uprising after uprising, the
massive shutdown of the International Monetary Fund in 2001, the
half-million protesters in New York City against the invasion of
Iraq, the many millions that hit the streets in the immigrant rights
movement, the protest camps of the Occupy movement, and most
recently, the rebellions against racist state violence in Ferguson
and Baltimore. These movements, much like contingent, unstable,
rapid flows of financial capital around the globe, surge and then
diminish, explode into the streets and then go quiet. Our movements
are our collective hallucinations, in a global system that seems to
be spinning from crisis to crisis.
So, what does it mean that young people, the children of
neoliberalism, seem to be abandoning the horizontalism, disavowal
and decentralization of my own generation X? As Jodi Dean suggests
in her manifesto, The Communist Horizon, radicals have never taken
the claims of horizontal democracy as seriously as they proclaim.
All movements, she argues, are vanguard acts; they make claims of
representation: "We are the 99%." "The Movement for Black Lives."
They claim to represent "the people," however they are defined,
against an elite or a class or an institution. Yet the question Dean
poses is not so much whether we will commit acts of representation,
but rather whether we will build organizations that can contain
difference and the multiple gaps, omissions and divisions within
capitalism. Shall we have the vanguardism of the subculture, or the
organization of the Party?
Young radicals are voting with their feet. After a generation of
uprisings that have left us hanging in the air, it is safe to say
activists are tired of phantasmagorical movements, of collective
hallucinations. The crises of capitalism, from racialized state
violence, to the "gig economy," to environmental catastrophe, to
rape culture, to privatization of our public schools and our
privatized imaginaries cannot be solved within the same affective
structures that produce them. Richard Wright wrote after witnessing
that spontaneous uprising on Chicago's South Side, "say comrade
here's the wild river that's got to be harnessed and directed." When
I read that 20 years ago, I winced at what I thought was Wright's
incipient Stalinism. Two decades later, it now reads like common sense.
Or perhaps rather, we are returning merely to certain 19th-century
verities
-- that we are a class society, riven by fault lines of race,
colonial status and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from
view, and neither is its opposition. Which is not to say DSA is a
Stalinist or even Communist "cadre" organization. Its mix of
centralization and decentralization, its democratic ethos within a
larger structure, its flexibility and yet its consistency speak to
both the needs as well as the disaggregated shape and culture of today's
millennial working class.
A party is more than just a collection of individuals; it is a claim
on the future, a vision of another horizon.
As the convention wound down last week, one of the older comrades,
someone I know from an earlier socialist formation, slowly led the
delegates through the tune and phrases of "The Internationale,"
before and after the crowd spontaneously erupted into the
White-Stripes-turned-political-football-chant, "Oh Jeremy Corbyn"
and then "Viva el Day-Ess-Eh" ("DSA, DSA, DSA" it was decided,
sounded too much like "USA, USA, USA"). This mixing of political
cultures -- of spontaneity and tradition, of a polyglot US with a
long tradition of democratic organizing
-- marks an epochal shift, away from spokescouncils and affinity
groups, and toward the political party. We should not be shy about
what a change this is. A party is more than just a collection of
individuals; it is a claim on the future, a vision of another horizon.
And it is one that we cannot wait another generation to witness.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Benjamin Balthaser
Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US
literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and the author of
Anti-Imperialist Modernism. His writings have also appeared in
Jacobin, In These Times, Boston Review, American Quarterly,
Truthout, Criticism, Cultural Logic, Tablet and elsewhere. Benjamin
is a member of the South Side Chicago Democratic Socialists of
America Steering Committee.
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